When you don’t have access to the command-line of your webserver, it may be nice to still run all your unit tests; so you need a way to execute the phpunit command from within a controller. This way, you can call your test suite by browsing to a URL of your site. To do things right, we start with a “test” controller /web/app_test.php containing these lines of code:

if (!in_array(@$_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'], array(
    '127.0.0.1',
    '::1',
))) {
    header('HTTP/1.0 403 Forbidden');
    exit('You are not allowed to access this file. Check '.basename(__FILE__).' for more information.');
}

require_once __DIR__.'/../app/bootstrap.php.cache';
require_once __DIR__.'/../app/AppKernel.php';

use Symfony\Component\HttpFoundation\Request;

$kernel = new AppKernel('test', true);
$kernel->loadClassCache();
$kernel->handle(Request::createFromGlobals())->send();

In fact, just copy everything from /web/app_dev.php but replace the string “dev” by “test”.

After reading the Cookbook article How to expose a Semantic Configuration for a Bundle I became interested in the possibilities for defining a configuration tree using the TreeBuilder from the Symfony component Config. This TreeBuilderallows you to build a schema against which the configuration values (or short: config) from/app/config.yml` and the like are to be validated.

Create an Extension

First make sure that your bundle has a /DependencyInjection/[BundleNameWithoutBundle]Extension.php containing the extension class:

One of the beautiful things about PHPUnit is the way it can be easily configured: for example you can alter the paths in which PHPUnit will look for TestCase classes. In your Symfony2 project this can be done in the file /app/phpunit.xml (if it is called phpunit.xml.dist, rename it to phpunit.xml first!). This file contains a default configuration which suffices in most situations, but in case your TestCase classes are housed somewhere else than in your *Bundle/Test, add an extra “directory” to the “testsuite” element in phpunit.xml:

In some cases you want to return a very specific Response in case the Request has some properties like a certain response format.

This situation calls for an event listener, which listens to the kernel.request event. The listener itself should be a service with some special characteristics: it has the tag “kernel.event_listener” and some extra attributes, i.e. the name of the event to which it listens and the method of the service that should be called when this event occurs. When you want to return a very specific Response, you should listen to the kernel.request event. We want the kernel to call the method onKernelRequest(), which we will define later.

I was looking for a way to automatically generate some documentation, and because all the required information was already in the DocComment blocks. I downloaded the great documentation generator DocBlox (which is a PHP application by itself) and looked in it’s source code. Soon I found DocBlox’s Reflection classes which are able to parse a DocComment block. So I wanted to use these classes! Here is how you can do it:

Sometimes you need to make changes to the Response object, after it is returned by your controller, but before it is rendered as output to the client (e.g. the browser). You may want to set some extra response headers, or “completely mess up the content” of the response. You can accomplish this by creating an event listener that listens to the kernel.response event. I give you a sample event listener which changes the Content-Type header in case the requested format is “json” and the browser’s accepted response format contains “text/html”; in that case, at least in my experience, the browser doesn’t render the JSON string as plain text when the status code is 4xx or 5xx. So in these situations, the event listener changes the “Content-Type” to “text/plain”, to be sure you always get decent output in the browser.

Symfony2 firewalls depend for their authentication on UserProviders. These providers are requested by the authentication layer to provide a User object, for a given username. Symfony will check whether the password of this User is correct (i.e. verify it’s password) and will then generate a security token, so the user may stay authenticated during the current session. Out of the box, Symfony has a “in_memory” user provider and an “entity” user provider. In this post I’ll show you how to create your own UserProvider. The UserProvider in this example, tries to load a Yaml file containing information about users in the following format:

First of all: dependency injection is GREAT!

Several of Symfony2’s core services depend on tags to recognize which user-defined services should be loaded, notified of events, etc. For example, Twig uses the tag twig.extension to load extra extensions. It would also be great to use tags in case your service implements some kind of “chain”, in which several alternative strategies are tried until one of them is successful. In this post I use the example of a so-called “TransportChain”. This chain consists of a set of classes which implement the Swift_Transport interface. Using the chain, the mailer may try several ways of transport, until one succeeds. This post focuses on the “dependency injection” part of the story. The implementation of the real TransportChain is left to the reader (as an exercise ;)).

Last week I was one of the several hundreds of PHP developers who traveled “all te way” to Amsterdam for the Dutch PHP Conference 2010. Though I had the impression that many PHP developers are using the symfony framework for their web applications, the speakers at this conference were friendlier towards the “father of the framework”, Fabien Potencier, than towards the framework itself. Fabien is a much admired developer himself, who is very conscious about software architecture, latest trends in PHP development and also is aware of the importance of fully covering the framework’s code with unit tests. In this article I will try to apply to the symfony framework, several comments on PHP programming and frameworks that I heard during this conference.